Rebeccalou: This Writer’s Life

This past March and into April, I worked on a piece about two of our kids, and their mother. I’d skimmed the surface of this story a half dozen times, wading up to my ankles in muck but never honestly taking it on. And then something happens and I find myself diving into a tale of addiction, abandonment and pain. This time I bite. I taste, chew and swallow. When the whole thing feels more heavy and deep than I want to go, I write anyway.

Weeks of work unfold and one day I’m ready for Tony to read my account of a story more his than mine: alcoholic spouse drives drunk with their 10-month-old daughter in the car. Nothing happens, but Tony’s image of what might have been snaps the frail marriage in two. The what if drives the last bit of fear out of him and sets him free, in a twisted kind of way, to make his move. A ten-year string of incidents, one more shameful and surreal than the next, and he’d had enough. Loyal by nature, protective to the core, he stops believing that life with a drug-addicted alcoholic would ever be anything other than the anxiety-ridden nightmare it had become. He takes the kids and leaves. Tess is a year old, barely, Pierce almost four. 

But facts are just the beginning. 

How does a mother’s physical and emotional abandonment smell? 

How does it taste in the mouth of a son? 

What shape does it acquire in a daughter? 

Does abandonment pound into eternity at the walls of the heart or simply leave a scar? 

How thick is the scab? 

What if there is no scab and the wound, a dozen years later, is still open and bleeding? 

Then what?

So I write the story to try to figure things out. I’d like to make sense of behavior that, on the surface, makes no sense. I look for openings, in myself and in them, and conversely, for the places I shut down and they the same. I tell stories. I reveal things. I describe the way their mother looked and behaved when they saw her in March after fifteen months of not so much as a phone call. I share what they tell me about her. I write of pain and hurt, of anger, resentment and longing, and yes, of love. None of it is easy. All of it counts. 

On a Thursday night I go to Tess’s school to work concessions for a theatre production. A friend and I talk about our kids. She says she’d like to meet my other two. “I kind of feel like I know them already,” she says, “from reading your blog.”

Bingo. I leave the school with a rumbling in my gut, fueled by fear. Once home, I walk the stairs to my study and print the piece, hand it to Tony. A bowl of popcorn sits on the bed between us. 

“I can’t publish this.” 

“What?! You’ve been working on it for a month.” 

“It’s too revealing. There’s stuff in here that could hurt the kids.”

I believed the piece had value, that it told the story fairly and tenderly, without judgment. I believed it contained information that could be healing for others. Together we read it again, this time thinking about classmates hearing the details, about well-intentioned parents saying something to their kids. In the re-telling I imagine the story growing legs and sprouting the head of a monster. All compassion is lost and one day someone in the mood to hurt says something and with it comes the sting of shame, of privacy betrayed, honor destroyed. And I have played a part in it? No way. 

There are moments in the life of a stepparent when you realize—more like caught by surprise—that these kids who walked through the door and rearranged your life have claimed your heart. Indeed, Tess and Pierce have settled in, not just in the house or in the rhythm of my days but in me, in the fiber and sinew, the grit and muscle of who I am. I watch myself protect them with the intensity I mistakenly thought I had reserved solely for the child I’d raised since infancy. Along with their father, they have become mine to look after, to nurture, to usher into adulthood, despite the debris left in the emotional wake of their earliest years and with all the joy and excitement that comes in watching young people grow into themselves.

There is one catch. I really wanted to publish that piece. The story had a pulse. I felt like its time had come. Love changed my mind, love and that gnawing sensation that taking their life public could harm two innocents who have been through enough. 

I am going to share one paragraph—the ending. It’s the happiest part of the story:

On a Sunday in March, Tony and I take the kids to the tubing hill at Winter Park. The day is glorious, not a wisp of cloud in that big blue sky. After a handful of runs, we decide to go down as a group, four on the belly. We position the tubes in a circle, sides touching, each of us front body down, legs extended, a hand wrapped through the handle of the tube next to our own. Our faces are inches apart. With the toes of our boots digging into the snow, we push ourselves over the edge and take off down the slope, hair flying, faces smacked by the wind, screaming, laughing, spinning in wide circles all the way down to the base of the hill. The terrain flattens and we cruise to a standstill in the open, snow-packed field. The four of us took another fifteen runs that day, shedding coats and gloves as the sun arced high above the peaks. In pairs, individually, sitting or supine, no run was as gratifying—or as fun—as four on the belly. No one jumped off early, no one let go, determined to stay connected, no matter what.